What to do with a surprise crypto windfall?

So the other day I was reading an article about Stellar, and I was thinking… Didn’t I have some of that? Yeah, I got some in an airdrop or something like that, but I couldn't figure out what to do with it so I just left it alone.

So then today I stumbled over another article about Stellar, and was like… Well, I suppose I might as well look into it. And long story short, sure enough, I had in my possession a few thousand of Stellar's tokens, which they now call lumens. Okay, great. So how much are they worth? Probably not much; I got them for free, after all. But might as well check. I scooted over to their coinmarketcap.com page and brought up my computer’s calculator widget, and… oh, wow. A couple thousand bucks. Out of nowhere.

Now this isn't my biggest crypto hodling in USD terms. But it is more than, say, the value of my current Steemit account according to its own measurement. Also, I'm at a point in my life where this isn’t life-changing money quite yet, so I'm not thinking of cashing out.

But I’m not sure I want to keep it in Stellar either. Stellar seems to be following the same angle as Ripple, positioning itself as a network to aid in real-world payments rather than strictly an online currency. It seems to have a bit of hype, and had a green day today - the value of my hodlings as of me writing this post was significantly larger than when I checked earlier this afternoon. Nonetheless, despite the growth, I'm not really that interested in what Stellar or Ripple are trying to do.

Recently I’ve been learning about smart contracts, specifically with Etherium and its programming language Solidity. And… it’s so uninspiring. It’s really no wonder that the most popular thing the world of smart contracts has brought us so far has been digital trading cards with cartoon cats. Maybe in the future it'll be more exciting, but right now there's just no there there. So I'm kinda turned off of Etherium and other ”smart contract platforms.“

Cardano seems to have some smart people working it and its currency, Ada, certainly looks undervalued, but at the end of the day, isn’t it just another smart contract platform, just less decentralized at the time being? Will it ever go anywhere? Eh.

There’s always Daddy Bitcoin. Will it recover? Even if it doesn’t, my hodlings are still way up from where I bought in. But I’m not sure I wanna throw more money into it. It’s old tech. Same with Bitcoin Cash; good on it for solving some of Bitcoin’s scalability issues, but other coins had already done that, so what else ya got?

I think Monero has a future. I like that it’s still CPU-minable - in theory… I tried mining for about a month or so a while back but never got close to making enough for a pool payout. Yeah, I’m done with that. Anyway, I think it’ll stick around for a while if for no other reason than it has become the currency of choice for the darknet vice markets. I do not and have not ever used them, officers, but I think the fact that others are gives it some value.

And then… there’s Steem. I’ve once again made another go at getting into the habit of regularly using Steemit again, and this time it seems to be sticking. All those months I could have been writing and curating and earning… definitely a more certain way to get a payout than trying to CPU-mine something. I really think Steem has a future because it is more than just a cryptocurrency; it is this whole wonderful, goofy, glitchy, chaotic blogging platform that, from what I can see, would would still be churning along even if Steem dropped to zero tomorrow - but it won’t. It brings a coin and its community together in such a way that no others can come close. Should I just dump it all into Steem Power and see where things go from there?

Well, I won’t decide tonight. I’ll sleep on it for one night, at least. I welcome any feedback or ideas others may have.